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Gertrud

1964, Movie, NR, 115 mins

Gertrud: Review

The unhappily married Gertrud (Nina Pens Rode) leaves her husband, accusing him of excessive devotion to his career. She has an affair with a young musician, but her hopes for romance are dashed when she learns he has been bragging about their liaison. A poet from her past--their relationship having ended long ago because she hindered his creativity--reenters her life. But she admits to her platonic friend Axel (Axel Strobye) that she is depressed because she falls in love only with men who cannot give her the full attention she desires. She goes to Paris alone and is reunited 30 years later with Strobye. In the finale, an aged Gertrud reads him a love poem she wrote when she was 16: "Look at me, am I beautiful? No, but I have loved." Director Dreyer's fans had to wait 10 years for this, his final picture, and most were disappointed, although some praised the work as his greatest achievement since THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. Composed of only 89 shots, GERTRUD is as filled with long shots (in duration and distance) as JOAN is with close-ups. Dreyer viewed the film as an experiment, calling it "a portrait of time from the beginning of the century." What presents the most difficulty is its talkiness (prompting one critic to call it a "two-hour study of sofas and pianos"), but it is in Dreyer's simple, noncinematic technique one realizes the purity of his vision. (In Danish; English subtitles.) leave a comment